Engleby Read Free Page A

again with a fast and deep inhalation. I like Gold Leaf, which used to be advertised on television by a man on a hillside with a red setter, or was it a spaniel? I like the mildness of Piccadilly. I like the toasted taste of Lucky Strike and Chesterfield and the way that French cigarettes hit the back of the throat like a blowtorch when you inhale. The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.
    I change brands a lot. I’m smoking white-tipped Kent tonight and have a pleasant taste of tobacco and red vermouth, which I’ve bought from the bar. The boy on the bar doesn’t know how much to pour, which is all right because he’s given me a full wine glass, into which I have put ice. I’ll try to make this last an hour.
    On the sofas and armchairs there are piles of coats, and as the evening goes on and people dance, there are also sweaters, jackets, bags. I can see Jennifer and Molly and Anne, and I keep a close watch on them. Avalon have a violinist and a girl with very straight long hair in a crushed velvet dress who sings with a warble in her voice.
    I imagine these folk songs go back many years, into some oral tradition. I make a note of some words. ‘I have for to say,/My own true love,/Is gone far away/In the [inaudible] lights of noon./And weep shall I never/Keen no more/’Neath the mantle of the moon./ So fare thee well and fare thee well/Said the sailor to his lass/For the silvery light of the Hebden Down [?]/Has brought us to this pass, kind sir,/Has brought us to this pass.’ It’s hard to hear exactly what she sings because the drums are so loud. I don’t think the first bard envisaged a mike with a grey blanket in the body of the bass drum.
    I’m now propped up by a sweating pillar . . . I’m watching. My body stays supported. ‘’Neath the mantle of the moon, kind sir . . .’ I shall return to Folk Club, to the present moment, loud and smoky, but for the moment I let myself go.
    I have a car which I keep in the car park of the Queen Elizabeth building, which is reserved for the Fellows. Sometimes the porters glue pieces of paper with strong reminders (and a split infinitive as a matter of fact) to the windscreen to dissuade me from parking there. I peel them off.
    Then I drive out to one of the villages. They have three-digit fingerposts dug into turf in the triangle where the roads meet. They have milestones leaning back a little by the hedgerows that in summer are heavy with hawthorn and cow parsley. They have war memorials (which I, perhaps alone, read) and brick-and-flint churches. They have pubs. Above all, they have pubs, and the beer in them doesn’t come like the stuff in the college bar from a metal cask, pressurised by the addition of carbon dioxide, which makes it taste of chemical soda water. In these pubs the untreated beer is drawn by a hand pump from the cellar through a long thin tube and makes a whoosh as it swirls up the glass, chestnut-amber, then falls as the handle is returned to its upright; then surges again, sparkling to the rim as the handle is pulled a second time; stops with a thin white froth, then receives a final half-squirt; after which the base of the glass is wiped on the towelling mat where you leave it for a moment for the beer to catch the light from the false-antique light brackets of the Wheatsheaf, the Green Man, the Red Lion – a place where anyone can go, where social ties are cut, so you’re frictionless, you’re no one.
    Does it sound as though I’m trying to keep something at bay here? Perhaps, but I don’t know what.
    Occasionally I stay the night, but not because I’m worried about driving. They normally have a room or two: damp, with a candlewick bedspread and a bathroom at the end of the landing. It’s not an idyll. I don’t bother with breakfast. I just want to be on the road. Undergraduates aren’t allowed cars, but I joined a golf club called Royal Worlington (I never go there) and